


Knocking at the Devil's Door

by SmexyWatermelon



Category: The Evil Within (Video Game)
Genre: F/M, Old Haunted House, Reader ends up inside the STEM, Reader is Les' twin sister, Relationship slowly building up, Sex, like you'll miss it if you blink, slight Joseph/Reader
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-28
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-09-13 00:15:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 17,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9096805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmexyWatermelon/pseuds/SmexyWatermelon
Summary: The only real solution to fight overpowered doctors was to run away. And that’s exactly what you were going to do, even if you had to risk your life doing it. You glance again at the medical folder on the passenger seat: a huge 'RESERVED' written in bold red capital letters covered the name 'Leslie Withers'. You breathe out deeply: it's since you were seven you don't see him.-----Reader is thrown in the game and has to face the nightmares regarding her own family and Ruvik, while desperately trying to snatch her twin brother from the STEM's claws.





	1. Knock knock

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this story two years ago on my phone and since it's truly perfect to be written in Reader POV I decided to post it as I rewrite it again, although I'm afraid the fandom is pretty dead by now.
> 
> To anyone listening, take a blanket, hot cocoa, and prepare for some crazy ass zombi ghost stuff. Enjoy this! (I know I will).

The night had fallen upon Krimson City, surrounding everything with a thick veil of darkness.  
Few people dared to stay in the streets at that time: most of them were criminals and cops, with some exceptions for prostitutes and homeless people trying to stay warm during the cold night. You watch quietly as one of them tries to light a fire in a trashcan; to be honest, you would have preferred to stay in a place more cozy and... well, safe, but that night was important, too important to be wasted.

You had parked your car in front of the Beacon Mental Hospital, the main psychiatric facility in the whole city, which took the name after the main tower: it was a nice, horrid building, crawling with spooky stories about doctors turned into butcherers and patients mistreatments – not very encouraging, given the reason you were there. You look up at its light, finding it difficult to be relieved by it: as it flashes on the street and blinds you, you hear a fuzzy noise and squint, shaking your head to try to focus on your task.  
You clench your fists on the steering wheel: it had been a while since you had had such a bad idea, but this time you felt like you really needed to pander it.  
You had taken months to track your brother down: it was like someone had tried to make him become a ghost, and unfortunately for you, they had been damn good at it. There was almost no medical record available about him, but you still knew how to make friends quickly and in which pockets put the bribes, thus after getting to Krimson City you didn't take long before finally tracking him down. What was worst, is that you knew about all the experiments he had been put through: they made your blood boil and your stomach knot, but after years of suffering injustices you knew all too well the only real solution to fight overpowered doctors was to run away. And that’s exactly what you were going to do, even if you had to risk your life doing it.  
You glance again at the medical folder on the passenger seat: a huge 'RESERVED' written in bold red capital letters covered the name 'Leslie Withers'. You breathe out deeply: it's since you were seven you don't see him. After your parents' death his mental illnesses had worsened quickly and you two were separated, 'for your sake', as the doctors used to say.

‘Fuckers.’ You mutter undertone, your nails digging in the wheel a bit as you brush away with the pad of your forefinger a tear that was threatening to fall on your cheek.

You had lived in an orphanage for a while. You weren't that good at making friends at the time, and staying alone for a long while gave you time to think. You kept feeling guilty for what had happened to Leslie: why he and not you, you kept wondering.

35%.  


That statistic haunted you- 35% of chance you could have been like him. You could have understood him better. You could have gone to the same place as him and protect him. You bite on your inner cheek as you suppress that thought away. You know you shouldn't have wished autism on yourself, but still you were his bigger sister. You should have protected him better.

You remember how it was after you got separated: most of the time, you pretended to talk to him; sometimes, you even thought he spoke back.  
But in the end, pretty girls get always adopted first, right? It took just some months before a charitable family adopted you, but they never agreed to let you speak to this "fake Leslie" you had invented to keep you company ever again. It would have been a little price to pay in exchange for a home, a family, a new life. But he was yours and yours only, and although you were tempted to give him up and forget, in the end you never really did.  
Then the arguing started, when they kept telling you he was dead, but this just made you think more about him; you kept falling out about the topic, having arguments until you finally gave up and admitted he was dead, even though you didn't really believe it - at first, at least.  
At sixteen, you had ran from home, and never stopped since then, living every day as an outcast. It was not easy concealing your albinism - but a little bit of hair dye and colored contacts made miracles these days. You spent a fortune in foundation, but as you passed unnoticed through the crowd you told yourself every single time it was worth every cent you spent on it.  
You didn't just get by with that life - you liked it. You wouldn’t have given up your freedom for anything in the world, even though people could easily define you as a criminal… and let’s just say they wouldn’t be entirely wrong to do so.  
Some years had passed since you had gone out on your own, telling your 'parents' to go screw themselves, and the ghost of your brother had slowly come crawling back: visiting your dreams, seeping right through your nightmares - which constantly threatened to tear you apart – and getting you more and more obsessed with him until you decided to hit the road again and look for him. You had never settled in a city, so it wasn't that hard to give everything up and start looking for him all over the country.  
And when you had finally found him, a barricade of doctors and bureaucrats had stopped you, imposing you not to see him. Then even detectives came, snooping around the unsolved case of your parents' death, telling you to stop doing whatever you were doing. But you never liked orders, did you?

"Well, I'm here. I suppose no." you mumble quietly to yourself. You had already sneaked in buildings before; of course, they were not psychiatric hospital and you had never tried to take away someone, but could it really be that hard?

Before your Hindsight could express its opinion, you take the torch, get out of the car and close the door behind you. You knew there was a secondary entrance just behind the building: you had waited until the shift change, and had approximately 15 minutes to get in, take Leslie and get out. You open the old wooden creaky door and sneak inside the building: you see some nurses at the end of the corridor, but you easily sneak past them and reach the stairs; you look again Leslie's room number on your palm: the writing was a little smudged, but you could still read "219" clearly enough on your skin. You go to the second floor, paying attention that no one spots you while you sneak around the facility, and start looking for Leslie's door number.  
You finally find the room, but it's dark inside and the door is half closed. You immediately falter thinking about what you should be saying: you hadn’t seen each other in eighteen years. They were too many for him to remember, especially since he had such peculiar conditions.  
In the end, you decide to stick to the simple plan of walking him out of the door, willing or not (albeit the idea of knocking him out didn’t really please you).  
"Leslie??" you murmur on the threshold of the door. You delicately push it open, trying to call out for him again: "Leslie, are you--" Before you finish, you smell a powerful stench of blood; you immediately reach for the switch and turn the lights on, just to see the bed soaked in that red filthy substance. The padded room, otherwise white, is covered in red handprints that frame a huge writing on the wall: "HE'S WATCHING."

Just after you finish reading the sentence, all the lights in the building shut down; your hands are shaking, and you take a while to reach for the torch and light it up. You slowly peek out of the door: there's no one there, and you cannot hear any noise from the other parts of the building. You take in a deep breath. You couldn't ask for help, nor going around randomly shouting 'Hello?': if police caught you again in a building where you weren’t supposed to be, they would have definitely put you in a prison cell and thrown away the key.

You notice there's blood on the floor just next to the entrance "This wasn't here before." you mutter to yourself, pretty sure your mind was playing some kind of twisted trick on you, but you still couldn’t quite put your finger on it.  
You follow the trail with the torch: it gets out of Leslie's room and as you follow it outside you realize it goes towards the end of the corridor, where you can see the silhouette of someone staring at you; he didn't look like a doctor. Maybe a patient. For all you know, he might as well be Leslie – after all, you haven't seen him in years. Even though the idea of approaching an asylum patient didn’t please you at all, you find yourself with a lack of choices.  
"Hey!" you murmur, and the man disappears around the corner. You quietly sprint towards him, turning towards the new corridor as well: it was incredibly long – you weren’t sure where it actually was inside the building since the asylum didn’t look so big from the outside – and had huge windows, though clouds were covering the moon and without any other source of light but your torch it was difficult to see where the man had gone.

"Only one way to find out." you mutter to yourself, as you start running down the hall.

After a while you stop: you're out of breath and you lean on your knees, wheezing heavily. "Shit, where did he go?" you curse as you look around with the torch, but you can’t see a thing in the thick darkness enveloping you. The torch starts working discontinuously, until it suddenly shuts down: you hit the back of it with your palm, hoping it's just the batteries that moved a bit inside – although your mind briefly makes you think about something much worse, drawing from the endless library of horror movies you had watched – when you soon realize your torch is definitely dead. "C'mon, not now!!"  
You give up with it and breathe out heavily, confused and starting to quickly get scared: you didn't know where to go, and you could easily tell there was something really wrong with this place. You turn around hesitantly, a bitter feeling enveloping your chest as you remind yourself again about your big escape plan regarding Leslie and your new fantastic life somewhere far away from here.

The clouds move up in the sky and the moonlight gets through the windows and bathes the corridor in a surreal light, lighting it enough for you to see the man you were chasing before- now standing right in front of you, just from the way you had come. You momentarily disregard the voice in your head that kept asking how did he manage to sneak past you without you noticing. "Hey! Are you okay? Who are you!?" you hiss quietly; you couldn't see a lot, you could only spot his tattered robe and his torso covered in scars: he looked _everything but okay._  
The man gives you no answer; you can't see his face, but as his eyes glint under the hood you suppose he must be studying you. You take a couple of steps towards him, more uncertain than what you mean to. “Can-can you hear me?” you stretch out your arm and try to touch his shoulder, but before your fingers can reach him, the man grabs your wrist, clenching it so hard you hear your own bones creak.

You immediately shout at him to let you go, definitely fucking up your ‘sneak inside the building’ plan. You dig your nails deep into the back of his hand in an attempt to free yourself, but you sadly note he barely flinches at it, his eyes never leaving your face. He finally gets out of the shadow and you can clearly see his face: two green-yellowish eyes were staring back at you under that hood; the look he was giving you was more than enough to creep you out, but seeing the other scars that were covering his cheeks and the stitches closing a wound just above his eye sent chills down your spine.  
He smirks at you; you take some moments before realizing that you weren’t going completely nuts and gravity was actually changing around you: you look around yourself, seeing the chandeliers moving toward the new direction of gravity and furniture screeching on the floors and falling past yourself. Your feet detach from the ground, while the only thing that keeps you from falling is the man that’s grabbing your arm, still standing on the floor, as if nothing was changing around him. You see his eyes shine under that hood and understand what he’s gonna do. “Oh, don’t you dare—“ you growl through gritted teeth, but he lets go of you anyway and you start falling through the corridor with a scream, until your back hits the door, which easily opens underneath your weight; The windows and furniture and all the rest of the world seems to have disappeared, no light nor anything else: all you can see is thick, black darkness enveloping you.


	2. This House Is Not a Home

Your fall is suddenly stopped by a wooden surface: you heavily land on your belly with a groan and the blow kicks the air out of you, forcing you to remain sprawled there for a couple of seconds before deciding to try to stand up.  
The room you’ve landed in is quite dark and you can barely see anything: as your eyes adapt to the darkness, you distinguish a piece of furniture just in front of you. You touch its surface and understand it’s a bed, although you soon realize it looks familiar. You look around yourself and spot something that looks like a window covered by tents: you get near it, the wooden floor squeaking under your boots. You carefully open it, but outside is just as dark as inside, there’s not even moonlight, just... a forest.  
You keep feeling the strange sensation you’ve already been here. Everything from that place – the walls, the windows, even the smell – was assuring you that you knew it all. You walk softly towards the darkest part of the room, where you could spot something else hiding in the darkness; as you get nearby it, you recognize another bed, but this time someone is sleeping in it.

You delicately grab the blankets and pull them to reveal the sleeping boy: he had white hair, terrible teeth and a peaceful look on his face. “Leslie…” you murmur, biting your lower lip. He is very young: He must be something like 6 years old. You catch your breath, the realization of where you were suddenly dawning on you “This- it’s impossible…”.  
This was your home, your old home, where you grew up with your real family. Before your dad was killed in the middle of the night, in his own house. Before your mum attempted to protect you, getting herself killed too. You gulp quietly: you had striven a long while to forget that nightmare, and being here again wasn’t helping at all; you hear a noise coming from downstairs: you turn around trying to remember where the door was and little Leslie wakes immediately up too.

“Sister?” he whispers. You turn to him, not really knowing what to do or say. You weren’t even sure you could help him in any way, since it looked like he couldn’t see you, his eyes staring right through you. “Did-did you hear that??” he tries again, but there’s no answer. He squints and gets out of bed, slouching his feet for the short distance that separated his and your bed: he tries to reach for you but soon realizes the bed is empty. He straightens back up and starts heading towards the door, but as soon as you see him doing that, you try to grab him: he doesn’t have to see what’s downstairs, he MUSTN’T see what’s downstairs. You want nothing more than rewind time and stop him from seeing the mess in the hall that had changed him forever.

No matter how hard you try, you simply can’t touch him: your hands pass right through him, it’s like trying to catch the air. “Don’t—“ he gets near the door and slowly opens it “LESLIE DON’T DO THAT!” you try to reach for him one last time but as soon as he opens the door a very strong light blinds you from the other side and you fall back on the floor covering your eyes. When you open them again you realize you’re alone: the door is wide open but there aren’t noises coming from downstairs, no sign of little Leslie around. You look around the room: it’s like it never changed, but now it’s covered in dust, the tents and the furniture are rotting, the toys are covered in spider webs. You can even see a rat running through a hole in the wall. You stand up again, but the dust makes you cough; you look towards the beds just behind you: yours is broken in two halves, while Leslie’s… 

“..What the fuck..”  
There’s a corpse. You hadn’t seen many dead people in your life: after what happened to your parents you had always tried to keep as far as possible from corpses, the only exception was that one time you had managed to track down the guy that had ordered your father’s assassination. But again, if it wasn’t for the satisfaction of getting some revenge, you would have never dreamt of doing it.

The smell is horrible but you force yourself to get near him and inspect the body: it looks like he’s been dead for quite a long time, you can see its sharp bones pocking on the old skin here and there. He’s bound to the bed, dry blood covering his arms and legs and… well, pretty much everything else in the little corner of the room. As you take another step towards it, you realize he was being held still by barbed wire. Long cuts mark its whole body, they look like… claw scratches - as if a bear had tried to eat him. “Looks like he’s been tortured.” You mutter to yourself, suppressing a cough as the stench became even worse. You can’t really do anything else for it right now, and although you don’t really like leaving a corpse in what once was Leslie’s bed, you turn on your heels and go toward the door, thanking it was over. The old floor creaks again under your boots and immediately after that you hear a roar coming from the body: thinking back, you would have surely preferred for a grizzly to be responsible about that mess.

You turn around just in time to see long arms pushing from the inside of the corpse’s skin and stretching out of him, the rotten flesh giving out under that strength and tearing apart, his stomach opening in two halves while another pair of unbelievably long arms and silky dark locks emerged from the body. You don’t wait for… whatever that thing is to follow you: you dash towards the door and sprint down the rotting stairs, tripping down when one of them breaks under your weight. You land on your back, just in time to see the thing at the top of the stairs: in the dim light of the main hall you can see it is covered in blood and scars resembling the ones of the man that threw you in this hell. It’s crawling toward you very fast, in a spider-like manner, and your fight or flee instincts kick in like never before, forcing yourself on your feet and bidding your legs to run for your life.

You immediately run to your right: you jump past the overturned armchair and pass nearby the fireplace, picking up while running one of the sharp iron instruments your father used to move the embers.  
You try to sprint to the kitchen just in front of you but the thing runs faster and grabs your right ankle, making you trip and heavily land on the floor; she is pinning you down to the wooden surface – you can feel her filthy locks covering your face and underneath them her growling mouth – but you hit her with the iron bar you just picked up and kick her away, crawling back into the kitchen.

As soon as you enter it you block the door with a chair: you hear her bang on it, and realize you don’t have much time before she will be able to slam it open. You try to open the door that led to the backyard and get outside, but it is closed. You grab another chair, hoping that it’ll be able to break the kitchen window and get the hell out of there, but in that moment the creature bashes through the door and you are forced to throw the chair at her and run towards the only way out left: the basement.

You close and lock the door behind you, even though you know it won’t last for long. You feel trapped, and you absolutely don’t know what to do: your only way out is through the door in the main hall – or the big window in the living room if that didn’t work either, but first you had to find a way to get past the thing that was chasing you.  
You run down the stairs in the basement: in front of you there’re many different objects, sadly none of them is a chainsaw (the thing that looked more like a weapon was a mop). The old house was rotting down, and you could see it even more in the basement: everything had been left to its own, you could even see several electric wires laying scattered on the floor. They were probably the ones that lighted up everything down there. You look just above them, to see one of the main water tubes of the house, leaking a dark liquid on the ground. A quick, simple plan forms in your mind, but you shake your head lightly and bite your lips, forcing yourself to think about another way out.  
“No. This is absolutely crazy. I’ll get electrocuted too.” The thing starts banging on the door, and the only thing you have in mind is probably a suicide, but you have no other ideas. With a heavy puff you take the mop and start hitting the tube, which crashes just after a couple of hits, almost showering you; the water splashes on the ruined ground and its level starts rising fast: it looks more like mud – _god I hope that’s just mud_ \- and in a matter of seconds you can’t even see your feet anymore, the “water” too thick to spot anything through it.

You hide under the stairs and wait for the thing to come down: you hear the door barging open and reach down to grab one of the plastic bottles you had seen laying around the place with the rest of the rubbish. As soon as the thing gets downstairs, you throw the bottle to the other corner of the room and when she goes to check you sprint to the staircase: the water makes your movements slow and loud, sloshing against your legs as you tried to run away from the room; although the thing tries to reach you, she doesn’t make it in time, and now she is just where you wanted her.

You get to the top of the stairs and push on the switch with your left palm, turning on the lights: you take a peek above your shoulder and see the monster downstairs writhe in the electrified water. A half smile forms on your face as you resume running.

You don’t lose time (although you were silently appreciating the fact that your trap hadn’t killed you) and run inside the living room: you wrap your hands around the door handle of the main double doors just at the foot of the stairs, but after trying to yank them open for a while you realize they are closed too.  
As you snap around to get to the living room window, you suddenly hear a distant shriek and look up just to see a sudden blackout shutting all the lights of the house down. “Dammit!” you stride in the hall and lift the little chair right next to the piano, throwing it against the window: it just cracks, but in your experience that’s more than enough – even though you weren’t really glad about it, it wasn’t the first window you were fleeing through. You take a couple of steps back and then run towards it, smashing it with your whole body.

Your right side sends pangs of pain from seemingly every single centimeter, but as you land in a bush just outside you force yourself to roll in the grass: you get up and start running again, no time to be in pain;  
even though you don’t know where you are, you absolutely know you want to be anywhere but here.

It takes you a while to get far enough for your mind to start working again, adrenaline making your heartbeat thump louder and louder in your ears. When you finally stop, out of breath, you aren’t surprised to see you had actually been running inside a forest: your house was in a little village, so it was clear that the thing you had been thrown in wasn’t your real house, and that this was just another nightmare. A very very _very_ real nightmare, but just an illusion nonetheless.

You keep pacing around the place, trying to spot any track to understand whether you were going somewhere, unaware that at the same time, back in the house, the silent hooded figure was pacing around the place, Laura hissing and groaning at his side. The glass fragments laying sprawled in the living room floor tinkle against his bare feet as he looks mesmerized at the broken window, his hand slowly caressing the back of his sister’s head.

A grin twists his already marred features, the glint of curiosity sparkles in his yellow eyes.  
“Interesting.”


	3. Host Greetings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want The Evil Within 2 *sob*

After running for what seemed like ages you finally find a zone with a lot of bushes and decide to take a break there for a little while: you fall on your hands and knees on the dead leaves that were covering the ground. You feel your throat and lungs on fire and little tears were forming at the edge of your eyes, but at least you were still alive.

During just an hour, you had tried to sneak into an asylum, followed a strange man during a blackout, fell through a door, landed in a house that shouldn’t even exist anymore, met a younger version of your brother and almost risked your life against… something (you really couldn’t find any other word to describe it, and weren’t even sure you wanted to).  
“This doesn’t make any sense… AH!” you feel a sharp pain on your right side: you had to add to the list that you had succeeded in getting out of a closed window, and the remaining shards sticking on your side were the proof of it. Many were little and you could easily get them out, but there was this big shard that took you some more efforts: you had to grab it with both your hands to pull it out of your flesh. “Great, just what I needed.” You grumble as you try to stand up again, with your hand firmly put on your wound.

You look carefully around yourself: you had heard plenty of ghost stories set into woods at night and not being sure where the thing that had attacked you before was wasn’t making you feel any more comfortable. You walk for a while, looking for a shack or any other sign of intelligent life (preferably the kind that didn’t want to eat you or rip you apart).

Damn, there had to be someone living here besides monsters!  
You finally spot a light in the middle of the woods: it looked like a lamp, or something like it. Lamp meant electricity. And electricity meant people. You start pacing as fast as you’re able until you reach the shack: it was made of wood, rotting down just like everything else, with a hole in the roof and what you guess to be its old owner hanging from a tree, fully imprisoned in barbed wire. You stare at him while getting nearby the building, almost afraid he’ll just come back to life. When you get inside, you tell yourself it’s just a stupid ghost story silliness: nobody comes back from death; still, you prefer closing the door behind you.  
You start looking for anything that could be of any use: there has to be something, anything…

You hear gun shots in the distance, getting closer and closer. You look around yourself, looking for a weapon, but you are interrupted by grunting noises coming from above. “Are you kidding me?!” you hiss undertone.  
You spot a closet and immediately get inside it: you close the door just before hearing footsteps on the roof and consequently the owner’s body falling through it. You put your hand on your mouth, desperately trying not to cough because of all the dust the crash had lifted.  
You look through a hole in the closet: his eyes were blank, almost glowing. You push yourself against the back of it, trying not to be seen. Luckily enough, he gets distracted by the gun shots and simply ignores you, while you make an interesting discovery: in the back of the closet, under two layers of rags, there’s an old rusty axe. You pick it up and grasp it firmly between your hands: it’s quite old, but you think it could still be able to cut through whatever is out there.

You hear the door slamming open again and you take a peek in the crack between the slightly open closet doors, seeing a man entering the shack and closing the door immediately after him: he’s holding a gun and you can see light shining on his police badge, but little else beside that. For the moment, you prefer staying in there, and let him face all those monsters alone. Someone bangs on the door and he takes some steps back to allow it to slam open, then he shoots at the first monster, which falls down in front of him. He then steps over him and starts shooting the second one, until it collapses to the ground too. The man paces out of the shack to take a look around, not seeing the first monster he had shot getting back up: it attacks the man who, taken by surprise, drops the gun. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.” You kick the closet door open and hit the back of the monster with your axe: he lets go of the man and falls down; you step on him and put your boot on its chest: he growls at you, and stops just after your axe has opened his face in two halves. You take the axe out of his head with a grunt and turn to the man to check how he is doing, but you freeze as soon you hear the noise of a gun being triggered. Your hands snap open at the sides of your head - though you were still grasping the axe between your thumb and pointer. “Whoa man! You put that bloody thing down now - I just saved your sorry ass and-“ you hear him mutter your name. You stop shouting at him and take a better look: he’s an Asian middle-aged man wearing glasses, covered in a lot of blood. And just then, you realize you know him: “Detective… Oda?”

It flashes all too quickly in front of your eyes: a couple of weeks after you had arrived in Krimson City a detective had come to talk with you. Competent and good-looking, he had followed you for a while - mainly because of the many cases you were involved into, but one that was unsolved particularly seemed to torment him: he asked you many questions about the Withers family, and you mainly wondered how the hell he could have connected you to that case, twenty years later and after you had changed at least three fake identities.  
In the end, none of you could get information out of each other and so he had decided to let you be, but you could never really forget about that pain in the ass who kept always snooping in your business for the whole time you had spent in Krimson City.

“What are you doing here??” you thought you would have never seen him again, and stumbling into him in this situation seemed far too odd, even for your renewed standards. “I don’t even know where ‘here’ actually is.” He answers, lowering the gun and pushing his glasses back on the bridge of his nose.  
You snort in defeat, your hand brushing your (h/c) hair back from your face. “Are you hurt?” he asks, with something that vaguely resembles worrisome in his voice. “Yeah. I mean- no, it stopped bleeding a while ago. I’m just…” you try to give a reassuring smile, but it turns out more like a pained grin. “…a little upside-down right now.” You say while breathing out deeply. You hear a distant groan, and the two of you look for each other’s gaze.  
“We’d better move.” He says, and you nod at him. “Agreed.” He gets out of the shack first, checking around with his gun to make sure it was safe before gesturing you to follow him: you lean the axe on your shoulder and comply, although none of you actually knows where to go.

You keep walking for a long while in the forest, but nothing seems to change. You could swear you had just been walking in circles for the whole time. “So…how did you end up here, cop?” you randomly ask him after you spot the same tree for the fourth time, though you were sure you had taken a different route this time. “I’m not sure I can tell you.” You stop and give him a terrible look “Jeez, we’ve been attacked by - zombies, I think - and you still act as if there should be some sense somewhere!” He looks uncertain, and turns his back to you “I was investigating with my partners on a massacre at Beacon Mental Hospital.” As he says that name, you gulp. “We separated, and… it all became messy so fast.” He looks back at you “I think I saw the city before, from afar, and- are you okay??” you had stopped listening, too focused on the thoughts of your childhood house and the hooded man. You probably had a terrible look on your face. “Yeah. Yes, I’m fine.” You say shaking your head a little; you start walking again and get past him. “And what were you doing before this?” he asks, eager to know what kind of trouble you had put yourself into this time. “Oh, you know… the usual. I was at the groceries, there was this lovely discount on carrots, and you know I _love_ fresh cabbages, I just couldn’t-“ he calls you by your name, with a really tired tone and an even more tired look painted on his face.  
“Alright…” you quickly bite your lower lip and put on the best smile you can muster, before turning around – while still walking backwards - and telling him “I may have fallen through a door after a spooky guy changed gravity. And I may have also landed in my childhood home. Which shouldn’t even exist anymore because my village was destroyed and erased from the maps decades ago.”  
“(y/n).” He looks even more pissed than before, and this time you genuinely laugh. “This is the truth, I swear! I know it sounds crazy, that’s why I was making up a lie.” You slow to walk beside him and face him “You will never believe what I saw in this place.” He gives you an unconvinced look, then takes out a notebook. “Where were you before this all started?”  
You make an uncertain grunt “I don’t really feel like talking about my personal life with you.” He glares at you: damn, he was so fun to poke. “Where’s my privacy and my assigned office lawyer and all that crap?”

“The truth, (y/n).” he murmurs through gritted teeth and you decide to humor him: you doubted he would have tried to arrest you right now. Maybe later.  
Definitely later.  
“Alright, alright.” You take in a deep breath: if you’re gonna survive this, you’ll probably end up in jail. Well, first things first: you still had to survive that nightmare. “Let’s say I was at Beacon too…” his eyes widen “You were there?!” “…yeah?” He gets near you and grabs your arm “What did you see? Who was the mass murderer??”  
“The… murderer? What are you talking about? Everything was fine when I got there!” okay, maybe a little bloody, but that wasn’t enough blood to call it a mass murder.  
Joseph seems speechless, so you continue “There was just this- this man. He looked like one of the patients. Covered in scars. Wearing a hoodie.” he lets go of your arm “Could he be Ruvik…?” “What?” He takes in a deep breath. You can tell he isn’t recalling something pleasant “We… we had met this doctor, when we got to the asylum. Jimenez. He was the only one still alive; I got to ask him some questions, but he didn’t listen to me: he kept blabbing about this Ruvik, who apparently is the cause of… everything, in here.”

You hear a high pitched noise, so strong it makes you fall to your knees: you close your eyes and take your head between your hands, waiting for it to stop.  
When you open your eyes again you’re in front of a crumbling building, one of the door has fallen down but you can’t see the inside from this position; Joseph is just beside you, and your eyes are drawn to his hand, which you are holding: you must’ve unconsciously reached for him. You awkwardly let go of him and stand up, observing the outside of the building: it didn’t look safe at all, but there was just forest around you for miles. You didn’t have another choice. “Can you walk?” Joseph looks up at you. “Yes. I think.” You take a step towards the big doors "Wait! It might be a trap!" you don't even turn to reply "I know, Sherlock, but what other choice do we have?" you look at him from on top of your shoulder "Whoever dragged us here wants to play with us. I'd say we play." You walk in and Joseph stands up and follows you inside the building.

Pipes are covering the walls, steam was everywhere; you look the map in the first room you reach: there were many exits, but only one seemed to be accessible from where you were; there was a ladder somewhere downstairs, that could lead you out of there.  
You take in a deep breath, exchanging glances with Joseph - who takes off the security catch from his gun and follows you deep inside the maze.

You had been walking for a while, the sound of steam thumping and hissing inside the pipes kept startling you every single time it was a bit louder or unexpected than usual. You swear you had heard other footsteps following the two of you.

Suddenly, there’s a screech in the distance: you and Joseph look at each other, and you start running in the dark alleys.  
“We’re almost- there!” you pant, but suddenly the high pitched noise returns, and it’s so painful you crouch on the ground, grabbing your head, Joseph doing the same as you.  
Your hand reaches his shoulder and squeezes it, but as you look at him you spot the creature that had tried to rip you apart before quickly catching up with you from the end of the hallway.  
You stand up and grab his hand, Oda painfully standing up and running to catch up with you: you know that this is the last turn you need to make before arriving at the exit, but when you turn around an invisible force pushes you back against the wall: you grunt as you hit the hard surface, falling on the ground.

Two mauled, pale feet stand in front of you. “Going somewhere?”

You grab the axe now laying in your lap and aim it at him, but even before touching his body it gets pulled away from your hands and thrown towards the ceiling, remaining stuck in the concrete.  
The man smiles down at you, but turns towards Joseph when he stops just in front of the two of you. “(Y/N)!” Joseph aims his gun at the man “Leave her alone!” he shouts, but the man doesn’t seem threatened: he just looks annoyed by him, and with a simple gesture of his hand the lights of the corridor shut down one by one, until Joseph heard a snarl hissing against the back of his neck.

Four elongated arms reach from his back, enveloping him and dragging him in the shadows as he screams and tries to shoot the hooded man, just for him to stop the bullet midair and tap it with the tip of his forefinger, letting it drop on the ground.

He kneels in front of you, a hand reaching for your face: you were too paralyzed – by fear, and pain, and shock, just pick one – to move.  
“You are a special little thing, aren’t you? Just like your brother.” He grins, as his finger traces the contour of your lips. ‘How does he know that-‘ “Oh please, don’t be silly…” you weren’t thinking that out loud. How did he- “do that?” he smirks again, his pristine teeth shining like a predator’s “I know everything there is to know around here.”

He grabs the back of your head, his fingers sinking in your hair and grabbing it as he leans against the left side of your face to speak directly in your ear. “I know why you’re here. I can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with to make Jimenez pay. I know I’ll enjoy watching you.” His hand leaves your head and takes your chin between his thumb and forefinger, his lips not even an inch from yours. ”Now go out there, and make me proud.”  
And just like that, he disappears in nothing. You take in a couple of deep breaths, brush away a tear you hadn’t realized shedding, and get back on your feet, grabbing the ladder with shaky hands, slowly making your way outside.


	4. Old Acquaintances

You’re crazy.  
There’s no other plausible explanation: you had gone crazy and a nightmare had finally taken over you, trying to make you pay for not saving Leslie before.  
Guilt. That was one hell of an explanation. Actually one your psychiatrists had always used to explain your behavior.

But something told you that it was not quite it at the same time…  
You had been told you were crazy for all your life, just because you liked speaking with your supposedly ‘dead’ brother when you were little – just after you had been adopted by that couple of ever-lovingly liars.  
You knew how it felt being crazy: the Beacon was not the first asylum you had seen during your life. Electroshock therapy had left you some scars that still marred you nowadays, both physically and mentally. Thank God your new parents had decided to get you out of there before someone definitely fried your brain.  
You don’t want to exclude the possibility, but you were pretty sure you were still sane of mind, at least for the moment, although as you kept looking at the zombie-like creatures roaming the village you couldn’t help but asking where that mental sanity had gone in all of this.

More out of desperation than anything you close your eyes and pinch lightly at your arm, then look around again.  
_Still here._  
You puff, slowly coming to accept the crazy situation: it was maddening how little time you had needed to accept you were trapped in a nightmare controlled – or influenced, or ruled – by someone like Ruvik, but you knew as well that it was the most reasonable explanation at the moment and in case it was just a hallucination you couldn’t have done a thing to stop it.

You take in a deep breath as you peek one last time around and run from cover to cover – crouching on the ground, silently running through all that madness.

It doesn’t take you long to slip inside the house unnoticed: you were pretty good at it. You always felt Ruvik’s presence staring at the back of your head, but no one was ever following you whenever you stopped to look around yourself.  
You pace inside what looked like one of the quietest places you could have ever wished of finding in this hellish nightmare; then you turn and see the mutilated corpse laying on the table, and you immediately regret having eyes.

You are about to go back the way you came, but you hear someone approaching and so turn on your heels in no time, the only possible hiding spot a tiny wooden sideboard. You practically jump inside of it and press yourself against the back of it, hoping that whatever was out there didn’t hear you get inside of it.

You heard sloshing and cutting sounds from the outside. Frankly, you didn’t want to know what whoever was out there was doing to that poor corpse, just the noise was making you sick.  
He kept mumbling the same things, but every time they froze your blood even more.

You don’t know how long you had been waiting in there, but after the usual morbid whisper, you heard something else coming inside the room. “Hush, hush, don’t you fret.”  
Suddenly, you heard another voice approaching.  
“Doc, no, don’t.” You lean the side of your head towards the doors, listening to the newcomers.  
“Valerio! It’s me!”  
“The good doctor is here.”  
“This is my brother, Valerio, Leslie’s original doctor…”  
Leslie. Doctors. Jimenez.

_Those **fucking** bastards._

Suddenly, a new rush of hot blood pulsed in your veins: you couldn’t wait to meet them.  
“Peel away.” The rough voice of Valerio kept mumbling. You felt nausea as few but vivid images flashed in your mind.  
“Expose everything.”  
“Hey, what are you doing?”

“So itchy… It itches!!” Grunting and thudding, in pain, shots being fired, something heavily dropping on the ground, and then it’s all silent again.  
Just like that night, so long ago. When your parents were murdered.

Another set of images flashes in front of your eyes: two bodies on the ground, as you spy through the slits in the wardrobe. Their killer still in front of you. Your dad’s gun, too big for your hands, trembling between your fingers as you raise it and pull the trigger until it clicks empty, Leslie screaming from the outside.

You hadn’t realized you had started wheezing, and you bite hard on your knuckles to snap out of it.  
“How could he have done that to Valerio?” “Impossible…” “Couldn’t be Ruvik.”  
You felt his charred lips against your ear again, longing on your skin for just a brief moment before disappearing again. You caught your breath but couldn’t help flinching at the sensation, the wooden boards creaking against your shoes.

You heard the noise of a shotgun being reloaded, pointing right towards your sideboard.  
“Wait! Don’t shoot!” you fling your arms in the air and close your eyes, swinging the sideboard doors open: you release the breath you hadn’t realized you had been holding after a couple of seconds, gladly noting the guy hadn’t still shot you. Your palms outside of the furniture, the rest of your body still tugged in the comforting shadows of your refuge.  
“Get out. Now.” He keeps pointing the shotgun at you, and you can’t really blame him. Had you a shotgun, you would have been pointing it towards anything that moved.

“Who are you?!” Your eyes set for a second on Jimenez: your hands clench in fists above your head for a brief moment before opening again. “My name is (y/n)(y/s). And if you haven’t already noticed I am an unarmed sane citizen of the US, so stop pointing that bloody thing in my face.”  
“How did you end up here?” he asks without lowering the shotgun. “I-I don’t remember.” You fake the trembling in your voice well enough, and as fake tears join the ones caused by your memories the man in front of you lowers the gun, albeit very slowly. The doctor simply looks at you in a strange way, but then goes back to looking at his brother’s – or what remained of him after Ruvik’s ministrations – corpse.

“And who am I speaking with?” you ask, a fake sob escaping your lips to drive away any kind of suspect the detective could have had on you. “Detective Sebastian Castellanos, KCPD.”  
At that acronym, Oda’s face flashes briefly before you, but you drive it away again. You really didn’t want to know what had happened to the poor bastard.

Sebastian glances at the corpse on his side and takes out his hunting knife, opening the stitches on the man’s chest. “What the fuck are you-“ you start murmuring, but then he fishes his hand inside of it with a sloshing sound and you decide to just turn around, deciding you would have never eaten after this till the end of your life.  
You see a discarded knife laying on top of the table in the corner. Since even the doctor is watching what Sebastian is doing, you slyly wrap your palm around its hilt and discreetly keep it against your thigh, hidden enough for them not to notice.

You start moving again after the corpse screamed in Seb’s face, and he finally decided he was done doing… whatever the hell he thought he was doing.  
It doesn’t take long for the three of you to clear the place and realize Leslie was not in the building. You walk out of there when a thunder cracked the sky, a yell coming from the distance.  
You try not to pay attention to all the ghosts and zombie-like creatures that keep appearing out of nowhere as you headed towards the building the scream had come from, mumbling to yourself it was just a dream anytime you felt your courage falter.  
You hear another scream and you’re the first one to enter the farthest house of the little village.  
“What’s wrong with this kid?” You involuntarily clench your teeth again: you want nothing more than yell what exactly was wrong with Leslie in Sebastian’s face, but that would have screwed your plan for the dear doctor. Your whole escape plan. And probably you would have lost points with Ruvik too (thing that would have mattered very little otherwise, but since your life was literally in his hands, this brought him on top of your list of priorities).  
You follow the detective inside the crumbling house, pacing right next to him while approaching the stairs. You hear a distant yell, something inside of you wishing you could scream too.  
“He’s gone down there.”

As you descend those ominous looking stairs a knot forms in your stomach, and you could’ve sworn you had just seen Ruvik’s ghostlike form walking just around the corner.  
You shush back the fear that was threatening to cripple you and walk beside Sebastian as he enters the room at the end of the corridor.  
“Help me… help me…” your hand clenches on the knife, but seeing Leslie immediately brings a wave of relief on your chest: he is just like you remembered, a little trembling worried snowflake.  
Anxiety comes crawling back again when Jimenez wraps his arms around him.  
“Leslie! Oh, thank heavens.”  
He wiggles to escape, and you have to bite hard on your inner cheek not to slit Jimenez’s throat then and there.  
“Doctor Jimenez is here. Settle down…” Thinking what that bastard had done to him for all these years makes your blood boil, but you restrain yourself: you know you have to wait.  
“Wait, doc. I think something is coming.”  
“Something here.”  
You feel something grabbing your hand: looking down, you see Leslie’s palm in yours.  
The detective quickly disposed of the creature, Leslie squeezing your hand tighter as the shots echo in the little room.

There’s a tiny pang in your chest as you wiggle your hand out of your brother’s grip, but you know you can’t let Jimenez have any doubts, for now at least.  
“This place is a death trap. Is there any place safe at all?” “I think that’s unlikely.” You overhear them, and as you silently pace behind Leslie, more anxiety floods in your veins.  
“Can’t get out… can’t get out…”  
You somehow start to hyperventilate, your hand tugging at your shirt: you had never been claustrophobic. What is this burden on your chest?  
“We must be going. This way.”  
“Can’t get away… can’t get away.” He whines, and the wish to hug him gets so strong you at least have to pace quicker and take his hand again: Jimenez was luckily too worried about your captor to notice.  
“The stairs are gone.”

The idea of materially not having any stairs in front of your eyes takes a moment to settle inside your head. You had to admit Ruvik knew how to play his cards right though.

“We must be collectively losing our minds.”  
“…losing our minds… losing out minds… LOSING OUR MINDS… LOSING OUR MINDS…”  
You see Leslie flinching just as you hear the high pitched noise, his hand tightening the grip on yours.

“Oh god… no…”  
You look towards the end of the hall, his name silently caressing your lips.  
“Ruvik. It is you.” The doctor says as Leslie ducks on the floor, screaming.  
“Who the hell are you?” you see Ruvik giving you one last glance before focusing again on Sebastian.  
“No, don’t follow!” but Sebastian is already running as the doctor yells that, and then…

The door closes.

No, that wasn’t quite right.

The door disappears right before your eyes: a moment was there, and the other was gone, but the more you tried to focus on it the more it seemed to never have existed in the first place.  
It seems like he was playing not only with your conscious self, but with your memories as well. That… couldn’t be good.

Not that fighting monsters was any better, but you really weren’t looking forward to reliving most of your past life…

Your fingers clench around the knife as you realize that now the detective is gone, Jimenez is left all alone with you.  
You can’t help but smirk as you fiddle with the blade.

“Doc…we need to talk.”


	5. The Twins' Strenght

There is no trace of fear or doubt as you say those words, the nightmare seemingly meaningless and powerless now that you are alone with the doctor.

Jimenez’s eyes shift from one side to the other, looking for a way out as you approach him.

“You’ve been Leslie’s physician for a quite a long while. And it’s obvious you know more about Ruvik than anyone else here.” You say calmly as you pace down the hallway, Jimenez stepping back out of sheer fear as you corner him with your sole presence.  
The blade shines as an affable smile appears on your face. “I can’t help but wonder why is that so.”

His back hits the wall with a soft thud, your free hand quickly clenching in a fist at your side. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” You smash your punch on his nose, sending him staggering backwards against the wall.  
“Don’t treat me like the fool you think I am.”  
His hands cup the injured part of his face, his eyes widening as he realizes he must have misjudged you.  
“Who- who are you?!” another punch lands on his jaw, and he flops on the ground.  
“I am the one making questions!” you shout, loud enough to intimidate him.  
You kneel in front of him, a little smile forming on your lips as you notice the trickle of blood dripping down his chin.

You lightly play with the knife between your fingers: being a stray you had been in different fights, and handling yourself with them had never been a problem. “There are many ways to cripple a man simply using a knife. And ‘crippled’ in this world means ‘dead’.” You see a drop of sweat running down his temple, his eyes leaving yours for a moment to look at the blade. “Now, I will ask you – _gently_ – one last time.” You close your eyes for a moment, inhaling sharply, having the feeling something was tugging at the back of your mind, drawing your attention away from the doctor.  
Your eyes snap open again, your fingers clenching on the hilt of the knife and keeping your focus on Jimenez.  
“Who is Ruvik?”

The doctor looks at his side, you can see his teeth pinching lightly at his lower lip, before murmuring faintly.

“He was… one of my patients. One of the most unstable-“ you punch him again, his eyes squeezing shut as blood floods down his nostrils.  
“Stop lying!” You roar.  
“I’m telling the truth!” there’s panic in his eyes, and you can see his jaw trembling before he speaks again.

“He… had worked for me… he has created... all of this…” he says nudging with his head at your surroundings.  
“What’s _this_?!” the doctor stares at you for a moment before explaining himself.  
“The STEM. A highly risky project to connect people’s minds together.”  
“That’s just bullshit.” Something changes in the doctor’s stare as you say those words: he feels offended by your quick judgement on what had been the creation that peaked his life’s apex.  
“It is not.”  
“And what assures me you’re not lying again?” The panic returns in his voice as you barely lift the blade again.  
“It is the truth, I swear!”  
“And what if I don’t like this truth?” your stare is cold, mentally rehearsing the long list of things they had done to your brother when he was all alone and scared.  
“You’re going to kill me just for that?!”  
“No. I will kill you for everything you’ve done to Leslie. And at this point Ruvik too, I guess.” The blade pushes against his neck and Jimenez freezes as he stares at you. “I can make it painless or the worst thing you’ll ever experience in your life. Your choice.”

“Wait! I’m the only one who knows how to get out of this!”  
The thought of stopping and letting him talk crosses your mind for half a second, but you quickly discard it: revenge was something far more true and sweet than whatever he was going to tell you.  
“I guess I will figure something out by myself.” you murmur as you press the blade of the knife against his neck, a crimson drop falling along his studded throat.

Leslie had been talking for the whole time, but somehow this is the only moment your attention gets ripped away from the doctor and focuses on your twin. “He’s coming. He’s coming-“  
As if announced, Ruvik materializes in the middle of the hallway, which had now turned into a wider room. Leslie lets out a scared scream and grabs the sides of his head.  
“Lying isn’t a good way to thread around our new guest, worm.”  
You stand up and back away towards Leslie as Ruvik skims the beaten up doctor.  
“You… you are dead.” The doctor stares at him in disbelief, quickly getting paler than what he already was.  
“You left me for dead.” Ruvik simply corrects him, and as he tilts the side of his head you can see Jimenez squeezing his eyes shut, his head dropping slightly as pain twists his features.  
You back away from him and unconsciously put yourself between him and Leslie, as if to protect him.

Ruvik quickly turns his attention back to you, leaving Jimenez writhing in pain on the ground.  
“Now now (y/n). I can’t let you kill him so quickly, albeit I admire the ideas throbbing inside your brain.”  
As Ruvik approaches Leslie grabs your hand, his other arm winding around your shoulder, using you to shield himself.  
“Why are you doing this to us? If it’s him you want, just kill him and let us be!” you see the doctor shivering in the corner of your eye.  
Ruvik stops a few feet from you, his eyes drifting to the side for the shortest of moments, as if thinking.

“You don’t see the point of this world.” He simply replies.  
“Honestly, you aren’t making it any easier.” You say calmly, fear digging at the sides of your spine, your entire back tense as you prepared yourself to face more of his monstrosities.  
He licks his charred lips, his eyes never leaving yours. “I saw your thoughts. Your memories. You may not be highly intelligent, but you are cunning.” He makes a pause, the idea of him digging into your brain making a little shiver run down your column. “What is torture if not a mean to get to greater answers?”  
He made no sense. This world made no sense. “You’re crazy.” You murmur, your teeth faintly trembling inside your own mouth.  
“Maybe. But if that’s the case, so are all of you.”

You almost feel the gears inside your brain clicking, when that horrible thought sets inside your mind. You don’t even know if it’s yours or his, or why he would have told you that, but…  
“You don’t want Jimenez…” your hand squeezes harder on Leslie’s, and Ruvik notices it and smiles as a sort of acknowledgment sets in your eyes.  
‘Smart girl.’ You hear an impalpable voice whispering right inside your ear.

“Know this: I have plans for you. All of you.” He says tilting his head to the side to glare at the doctor.

As he raises his palm a wave expands in the room, dragging Jimenez’s limp body out of the wall. Leslie’s hand squeezes tighter on yours as you shield your face with your arm from the deafening sound and the thundering wave approaching the two of you, clenching your teeth together as your shoes seem to slip slightly on the ground.  
Suddenly the noise is gone, and as you lower your arm and open your eyes again you see something resembling astonishment painted on Ruvik’s scarred face.  
He grins, the look he’s giving you resembling the one of a child on Christmas’ eve as he takes a couple of steps forward and looks at the two of you.

“Anne- anne-“ Leslie sobs just above your shoulder, his cold fingers trembling in your hand.

Ruvik’s eyes stare into yours as you soothingly comfort Leslie, never breaking eye-contact with the ghastly man. Those greenish irises set down on you and your twin’s conjoined hands.

“Aren’t you something special?” he rhetorically purrs as loud footsteps are heard echoing from the shadows behind him.

You don’t wait a single second before running towards the other end of the room, dashing through a newly created door and making sure Leslie was beside you “Run run run!”  
Leslie follows you down the hallway, the sound of his bare feet slapping against the ground followed by your new hunter’s heavy ones.

As you turn around the corner you spot the bear trap too late, its sides clenching around your ankle and blood spouting out of the wound in hot waves.  
Barbed wire creeps up your leg, Leslie stopping for a moment before you yell him to run away. The knife is in your hand again as you cut through the wire: the heavy footsteps reach you, and as your mind registers what it thought would have been your last moments the huge man sprints past you, trying to reach for your brother.

“LESLIE!” you scream at the top of your lungs, your extended hand pointing towards the back of the giant man as another set of tattered arms wrap around your body, one around your waist and the other covering your mouth, and everything – the pain, the fear, the noise - quickly fades to black.

 

“Why “(y/n)”?” your head snaps towards the direction it had come from, or at least tries to: you soon realize you had been bound to a chair, every single part of your body restrained against it. It’s him again, his voice like sand paper to your ears.  
Deep, rough. Oddly appealing.  
“What do you mean?” you ask, your eyes softly opening and adapting to the dim red light bathing the two of you inside the new room. “You could have picked a better name, don’t you think, Annie?”  
You don’t know how you managed to ignore the fear that was heaving on your chest, but a smirk creeps up your lips. “You first try to kill me and then insult my name?” you yank your head against the chair’s headrest, your eyes following him around the room as he quietly paces in front of you. “What an impolite guy you are, Ruvik.” You exhale deeply as you briefly close your eyes.  
You would have been scared. You should have been scared. But frankly, you knew that if he wanted you dead he could have already killed you.  
He was toying with you. That meant he was either very bored with everything else or very interested in you, and given you seemingly weren’t the only new subject he had got to play with, you opted for the latter explanation.

Suddenly it feels like something is pressing against your cranium again, Ruvik intently staring at you. Your first reaction is to squeeze your eyes shut, feeling like his fingers were trying to dig inside your memories again.  
“Stop.” You snare through gritted teeth, forcing your eyes painfully open again to return the stare. “Out of. My fucking. Head. You. Psycho. Fuck!”  
The pressure fades into nothing just like it had appeared, and you fall limp against your boundaries, your eyes still looking for his.

“I’ve never had quite a mouthy subject as you.” He smirks as he caresses your cheek, and you open your eyes again and look at him with a firm smile. His thumb presses against your lower lip, slightly pulling it down “I’ll enjoy ripping that smirk off your face.” 

His hand gets out of your line of sight for a moment: with horror, you realize he’s playing with a syringe. You can swear you just saw a glint of his madness shining in his eyes as he focuses back on you: you shake your head, but the straps keep you locked, the needle getting closer and closer to your face. “Don’t- DON’T!” you try to kick, but all your body is restrained, a wicked grin twisting Ruvik’s features.  
The pain blooms from your inner eye and spreads down your brain and column: as your eyes close shut by reflex a blinding light suffocates you, the whole world spinning as you fall down, hitting a hard surface again. 

 

“It’s not real…. It’s not real…” you curl on your elbows and knees as your eyes adapt to the darkness again. You take in another last deep breath, closing your eyes, your forehead pressed against the cold wooden boards as you let the last remnants of that blinding pain fade. “It’s not. Real.” You state one last time, before taking in one last deep breath and standing up from the hard wooden floor.

You’re home. Again.

You drag a hand on your face and pinch the bridge of your nose, your thoughts getting somehow blurred for a moment before a noise made your head snap towards the door of your childhood room.  
“Annie?” a childish voice asks, and before you can think about it you are already running downstairs, almost tripping in your own feet as the ghost of the figure in front of you approaches unaware the bloody mess in the living room “Leslie, stop!” You run next to him, your little brother screaming at the top of his lungs.  
You stop just behind him as the familiar scene that haunts your nightmares is perfectly replicated in front of your eyes: your parents lay drenched in a pool of their own blood, covered in wounds, the man with the black gloves standing in front of them, turning around when Leslie screamed.  
Before he can raise the bloodied knife again there are several bangs coming from the little wardrobe on your right side, blood blooming from the man’s chest and arms as the bullets pierce through his skin.

When the ghost drops down on the floor, the black crimson liquid pooling around his body, Leslie runs back inside the kitchen and you remain there, staring at the murderer who had ruined both your lives.  
Your attention gets drawn to the little wardrobe: you calmly approach it and open it, knowing already what would have been inside. A younger version of yourself is staring in disbelief at the room before her, a pool of blood spreading more and more from beneath the bodies in the center of the room.

You kneel down, brush away the girl’s tears and cup her face with your hand, Ruvik’s tattered form shining in the ghost’s eyes: you snap around immediately, but find an empty room instead, and as you look in front of you again you notice even your ghost was gone.

You have the time to sigh deeply before you hear something smashing through a window again, a deafening roar muffled by what looked like a very old and rusted safe.

You run back in the kitchen and find the door open this time: you breathlessly run up the clay path that brought back inside of your childhood village, confusedly trying to make out how much of it was memory and how much was real.

As you run breathlessly down the little streets, something spurs you to go towards the path that lead to the old mansion on top of the cliff.


	6. Astraphobia

You keep running, but every corner you turn, the thing is always right behind you. You manage to reach the outskirts of the old mansion and leap over the railing, flinging your legs on the other side and landing fairly safely on the ground. You don’t turn around to see what the safe-headed man was doing, albeit from the noises you could tell he was trying to pry the door open – and knowing how strong he was, it wouldn’t have taken him long before getting back on your tail.  
You run down the steep path: not many cars had come here. Recently, at least. Not that it could have really mattered since you were inside a madman’s mind, but any detail might have been important for all you knew, and while other places looked populated, this one - in the middle of the woods - looked completely abandoned, and that fact in itself somehow made a warning bell ring inside your head.

At some point you need to stop and take in some deep breaths, lungs on fire and little tears forming at the edges of your eyes as you inhale deeply with your hands leaning on your knees.  
When you look up, your vision slowly focuses on a sign.  
“Victoriano… Estate?” you vaguely remembered the mansion on the cliff side near your village: you were too little to remember anything about your surroundings, especially after what had been done to you during the years spent inside the asylum.

You remember hearing the name Victoriano, but you were mostly sure it was not because of your childhood.  
As you slyly approach the two big doors at the end of the courtyard, you ponder the matter further, reminding yourself that there might have never been a mansion in your village at all: Ruvik could manipulate many things in this world, one of them being your memories. It wouldn’t have been hard making up something that wasn’t there in the first place for him.  
As you touch the handle of the door, another set of images flash in front of your eyes, although they are somehow different from the ones you’ve experienced so far: before, they were gloomy, bloody, with a sense of oppression and anxiety embedded in them. Now they are bright, and somehow blurred.

You look around yourself, white padded walls surrounding you. You hear the only door creaking open, the two hospital attendants pacing next to you and grabbing you from both your arms, yanking you on your feet.  
Then you see the doctor, standing on the threshold, staring at you. You had never liked him.  
He talked nicely, but acted selfishly and violently. Always.  
You sniffle, a set of vivid memories reminding you of what the experiments were about, of what could have happened to you during that day.  
“There, there, Leslie, what’s with the long face?”

You lower your gaze almost automatically, and you can feel his hand ruffling your hair: you turn your head away and close your eyes until he stops.  
You hear him sighing before pacing away, leading the two janitors pulling you inside another room: not bright, not oppressive, but wide, with a lot of bathtubs, a lot of men walking around it.  
One of them somehow stands out from the others.  
He was skimming some pages kept inside a hospital folder, smart clothes and bandages covering his whole body.

You felt petrified when his soulless eyes set on you.  
Jimenez steps between you, something resembling pride in his voice. “Leslie, this is doctor Victoriano.”

The images stop and the lack of light in your surroundings leaves you blinded for a moment. As you clutch your hands against your closed eyelids you clench your teeth together, pain softly oozing away from the middle of your brain.

“What was that?” you softly murmur, somehow hoping Ruvik could just stop playing games and tell you what he wanted.  
You abruptly move away your palms from your eyes when you hear the big set of doors before you ominously creaking open, and immediately chills are sent running down your spine.  
You take a step inside the place, carefully skimming your surroundings and ready to bolt back in the garden at the first sign of danger.  
You hear snarls and banging in the distance, realizing the safe-headed man was somehow catching up on you, and decide to disregard the hazards and move inside the house, choosing the lesser of two evils.

Immediately after, the doors close shut behind you. “Fuck.” You swear undertone, taking in a deep breath and quietly pacing inside the house, a giant door standing in front of you immediately catching your attention.  
You look around yourself again, but since you can’t see anyone in the distance you decide to approach the gargantuan door: up close, it looks like a circular safe door, one you could have found in a bank or something like that.  
You touch it with your hand, cold metal meeting your warm palm as you caress the smooth surface.  
You notice there are two keyholes, placed symmetrically next to each other at roughly your height.  
Suddenly, you realize there’s a sweet melodic tune playing in the air: as you close your eyes, you can almost see your father playing those same notes on the piano in your childhood home.  
It’s exactly the same song, and albeit you know Ruvik simply wants to lure you somewhere, you can’t help but follow it.  
You drift towards the right side of the stairs, following the tune down the corridor, stopping in front of a set of closed doors.  
You remember how dad always smiled, lids half-closed, as he lovingly played that song.  
A chord particularly catches your attention: you remember how dad always turned around without stopping and asked you to-  
The doors creak open, an immaterial voice seemingly coming from the walls makes way into your mind. “Come closer.”

You look at his hooded form playing on the piano, his scorched hands impossibly moving on the keys, as if playing such a complicated instrument didn’t cause him any pain. He looks up at you without stopping, his eyes shining underneath the hood: fearing his reaction you decide to comply, and when he sees you approaching he glances back at the keyboard.  
Your fingers feel rusty as you softly place them on the tiny portion of piano you needed to use: as you press lightly a note births from underneath your fingertips, followed by many others that chase and flee with Ruvik’s own, creating that long forgotten tune you had buried under years of mistreatments.

You almost enjoy it, flashes of your childhood appearing in front of your eyes, the first good memories you’ve recalled in a long time.  
The last chord dies underneath your fingertips and you take in a deep breath, struggling not to look towards Ruvik.  
“What do you want from me?” you ask him without moving. “Does it matter?”  
“You are not answering.”  
“I never said I would.” He says as he stands up, pacing around the little hall.

“You are wondering why I won’t just kill you. It would be easier and quicker. Would save me some trouble. But you cling to the reason I let you live, hoping I’ll let you walk out of this unscathed.”  
You swallow that _I just stuck my leg into a bear trap- unscathed my ass_ that was threatening to get out of your throat and let him go on, knowing he probably heard you anyway.  
“But then we would come in conflict again, for I won’t let you take Leslie away from me.” He’s next to you again, and you turn around to look at him. “Funny, I was going to say the same thing.”  
He slightly shakes his head and turns around, pacing next to the wall opposite to you.

“Why Leslie?” You ask after a long silence.  
Albeit the only source of light in the room was the moonlight coming from the window, you can see him smirking all the same from the end of the hall, disappearing and reappearing in front of you. Your first reaction is to flinch when the skin of his rough hands touches your face, cupping your cheeks.  
“I’d like to play a game with you.”  
“Please don’t tell me it’s chess. I suck at it.” You childishly whine.  
For a brief moment, there’s something resembling irritation in Ruvik’s strict stare, but his body seems relaxed: he must like your cockiness.

Your eyes look to the side and close for a moment before getting back to his.  
“I’m not good at… intellect games.” His thumbs press against your skin and force you to raise your head and look at him.  
“I told Jimenez not to lie, and as far as I am able to, I am not lying to you.” He glances at your lips for a brief moment before looking back into your eyes. “Stop. Talking to a liar is frustrating.”

You inhale deeply, your eyelids closing for a moment. The most unbearable part was that he had the control over all this. There was no other way but follow his instructions.  
“What kind of game?” You open your eyes again, the corners of his cadaveric mouth tilting upwards in a pleased smirk.  
In a moment, he disappears and appears again at the threshold, that same immaterial voice gently invading your skull again. “Follow me.”

You pace out of the room and trail behind him around the house. For a moment, you can swear something shifted in the air, like it had become somehow heavier. You follow Ruvik down the aisle, the feeling of uneasiness simply increasing as you obediently walk behind him.  
You feel your stomach forming a knot when you hear a deafening boom echoeing in the distance, and when you turn around the corner and get inside the main hall your insides twist again as a flash of light and another boom seem to hit your body with the strength of a nova explosion.  
“Something the matter?” you clutch at your chest, trying to breathe regularly, but it’s easier said than done. You lean against the wall with one hand, your other palm still spread against your chest. “You wanted me to tell the truth?!” you angrily glare at him. “This is a fucking dick-move.”

The scientific name fled from your mind: you don’t know whether it started with the orphanage, or the electroshock sessions at the asylum you had been secluded in just months after, but whenever you heard a thunder booming in the distance you felt your heart trying to pounce out of your chest.  
You lean against the wall with your back as you take in deep breaths.  
“Do electrons scare you so much?” He naively asks, like _he_ didn’t know.  
“Yeah, keep blurting out your scientific shit. Because it’s totally helping.”

There’s again that disapproving look in his eyes as he turns around, pacing away from you. “There are two keys in this house. One above and one below. Find them, and you’ll flee. Fail, and they will eat your corpse.”  
You raise your gaze towards him. “’They’ who?”  
He smirks as he disappears, a chorus of snarls resonating from somewhere behind you. Too near, for your tastes.

You bolt out of the room without thinking, running inside what you suppose is the dining room, grabbing bottles and throwing them at the first of your chasers before sprinting down another aisle.  
Another creature is blocking your path ahead: you keep running towards him and glide on the floor, dodging the axe swung at you and landing a kick on his ankle, making him flop on the ground. You jump beyond him and run until you find what you supposed was the canteen, and even beyond in a storage room.  
You block the door with a shelf and look around, hoping the key Ruvik was talking about would have been down here.  
You hear banging and growling from behind the thin door, half-slobbered insults and death threats screamed at the top of their lungs.

You walk deeper inside the room when you’re sure the door is blocked enough, another boom of a thunder makes you worriedly look up and fold your arms around your chest. You grab your elbows as you try to fight back the urgency to find somewhere to hide. You sniffle loudly as you try to think about the two keys Ruvik had told you about.  
“C’mon… it’s Ruvik… think as he would think…” your eyes land on a corpse laying on the table at the far end of the room. “Oh, fuck, no.”  
Someone- _something_ \- else bangs on the door and you shoo away your reticence and disgust with a gulp and approach the very dead patient.  
The corpse is similar to the one Sebastian had cut, but this one has a pig head stitched in place of his old one.  
You quickly find a scalpel to cut the stitches on its collarbone open, pushing your hand inside between the slimy cold folds and digging with your fingers inside its throat, trying to stifle the impulse to retch.

The corpse suddenly comes back to life and you immediately stab the pig’s head in the eye, digging the scalpel deep inside, its arms falling limp before it completely stops squealing.  
You shudder as you keep pushing your hand farther inside, and you close your eyes shut until your fingers touch something metallic.  
You immediately rip it out, the banging and snarling coming from outside of the room ceasing.

You clean your hand on the first piece of clothing you can find and look towards the entrance of the room, tucking the key in your pocket.  
You approach the door and wait for a couple of minutes to pass before opening it: you poke your head out of it after a while, but there was nothing outside. Weren’t for the damage on the furniture you could have sworn no one had walked these halls in years.

You carefully make your way out of the canteen, back towards the main hall: just when you’re about to leave the dining room you hear something hissing, and you still yourself immediately, trying to understand where the source of the noise was located.  
You turn around but you can’t see anything strange near you and decide to move towards the main hall before anything tries to catch you.  
Just then, looking in the darkness surrounding the distant doors of the mansion, you can see something shifting: it’s so feeble it is barely visible, but you can see different dark shapes drifting in the darkness, slowly moving around and seemingly staring at you.

The lights shut off in the whole house, another thunder shacking your limbs and illuminating the main hall, making you realize you are surrounded by half a dozen of those evanescent shadow creatures.  
Your survival instinct kicks in again and you run upstairs, something thumps against your right shoulder and makes you topple on the stairs: another thunder booms in the distance as you look up, the shadow looking back at you as you kicked yourself back on your feet and started running again, blood dripping down your right arm.

You keep running through the rooms and barge inside the only lit room you manage to find: you close the door behind you and lean on it with your whole body, taking in quick breaths.  
Your eyes set on the wound dampening your right shoulder: the texture of your gilet was intact, while underneath a gash marred your skin, blood dripping down your arm, a dark violet bruise forming where the shadow had touched you.  
You drag your palm over your face, trying to ignore the pain and focus again on how to survive. You still needed a key, after all.

You raise your gaze, realizing you had entered the bathroom: everything was mostly pristine, except for the blood filled bathtub in one of the corners of the room.  
You gulp as you approach it, kneeling next to it: your hand temptingly approaches the surface, ready to pull away if something tried to grab you.

A few seconds passed before you mustered enough courage to dip your hand inside, the consistence of the liquid becoming thicker and thicker as you reached the bottom of the tub.  
There’s something slimy on the bottom, solid, like freshly gutted organs. You have to dig through them for several minutes before being able to retrieve the last key you needed to get out of there.

You get up and take a few steps back, nauseous after digging through flesh for the last ten minutes; you quickly wash your hands and take a glimpse of your face in the mirror.  
You take in a deep breath, leaning with your hands on the edge of the marble counter, smiling a little at your reflection.  
“We’re getting out of here.” You murmur, trying to light up the little sparkle of hope you had got left after this experience.

A single second of silence passes before the mirror surface cracks from the inside, the lights above you flickering before shutting down: you grab the keys and run out of the door as the mirror explodes, sending shards flying in your direction.  
You almost bump into another shadow standing in your way: you realize the direct way to get back inside the main hall is swarmed and turn on your heels just in time to run in the opposite direction, getting inside a room as soon as you realize even the other aisle is blocked.  
A thunder echoes through the house and its light flashes from the windows and cracks: you instinctively dive underneath the first bed you manage to find, hearing the door creaking open behind you.  
Another boom echoes in the mansion and you press your hand against your mouth, hot tears streaming down your icy cheeks as you bid your body not to move, all your limbs trembling madly, your hand gripping tightly the keys. There’s no one tangible standing before you, but on the pavement, you can see the shadow of a crooked figure, a woman probably, holding a knife.

As the shadow walks out of the room and inside the next, you slip from underneath the bed and stand up again, quietly making your way towards the door.  
You can barely see them moving around you and decide sprinting down towards the door might be your only chance of making it out of there.  
You start breathlessly running again, tears blurring your vision, knowing the shadows were there just because you felt pain prickling your skin, leaving cuts and scratch marks wherever their presence lays upon, but you push further until you’re running downstairs, reaching for the big door, countless little wounds bleeding and dampening your clothes.

“Fuck fuck fuck fuck-“ you frantically turn the keys between your fingers, and when you finally manage to grab them and turn them into their respective keyholes you barely have the time to breathe before sprinting down the new, dark aisle of the Victoriano mansion.


	7. Dead End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys! We're gonna have TEW2! I'm so glad I was wrong. (still, am I the only one who kept wondering when Leslie and Ruvik would have jumped out while watching the trailer?)

You don’t know for how long you had been running inside the mansion. Thinking back now, it looks like you had spent days roaming that goddamn velvet maze.

You recognize the feeling of that terrible presence staring at the back of your head, that excruciating sensation that crept up your skin every time you focused too long on the mind behind all this madness.  
You see a door in front of you, and instinctively bash through it: you can’t help but turn your head around as you see now a new environment opening in front of you, no more of that infinite corridor.  
You stop running almost immediately, hitting your waist against a railing that stopped you from plummeting in the void just beyond it, feeling your lungs burning inside your chest. You quickly skim your surroundings, but realize this was just a wide terrace overlooking an endless shaft: beyond the railing there’s just darkness, you can’t even see the end of it.

“You flee from me, and yet you still face me whenever I find you.” The by now familiar coarse voice of Ruvik murmurs inside your mind.  
You feel the hair on the back of your neck standing up as you hear him approaching you: his bare feet make almost no sound, but in that deafening silence, his presence is the only thing you manage to focus on. “Why do you still fight? You’ve realized there’s no way out… unless I grant it.”  
Your knuckles turn white as you grab the railing; you inhale sharply and turn around, anger overshadowing the fear that for a moment had settled in your heart.

“Because I will find my twin. And I will stop you. And I’ll make whoever allowed you to build this bloody machine pay for what they’ve done.”  
The ghost tilts his head to the side and sighs, his eyes never leaving yours. “Mh. So emotional. Just when I was beginning to like you.”  
You glance at your right for the briefest of moments, spotting another corridor leading who-knows-where, but anything at this point is better than here.

You run towards it, but as soon as you reach the entrance of the hallway something hits you hard on your stomach, digging a good half foot inside your flesh, pushing and pinning you against the opposite wall. The warm pain spreads fast on your belly and up your chest, a tickle of blood smears your lips as you soundlessly gasp in pain, the giant figure of the safe-headed man now towering above you.  
The faceless monster retrieves his sharp hammer and a gurgly breath escapes your lips as you start sliding down the wall. You reflexively try to pin your feet to the ground, feeling all the strength flooding from your limbs as you flop on the floor.

“Y-you can’t. You… w-won’t-“ you clutch your fingers around the oozing wound on your stomach, a wave of nausea overcoming your senses as you feel the coppery taste of blood creeping up in the back of your throat.

An invisible force pins you and lifts you up against the wall behind you. You can feel it pressing on each of your appendages, tightening around your throat. Light steps are approaching you.

Your protests become an incomprehensible bloody gurgling as Ruvik leans in to caress your hair, combing a lock behind your ear.  
“Make it easy for the both of us, and give in.”  
You manage to open your eyes, a trickle of blood falling down the side of your mouth. Though you can’t speak, your lips silently form that word Ruvik seemed to despise so much.  
_“No.”_  
It doesn’t matter how much he pushes and presses you, there’s still that fire in your eyes that spurs him to do it, to end your life, for he knew you would have never knelt before him.  
But maybe that’s what intrigues him so much about you: he knows exactly what the others need to be exposed to to be bent to his will. But no fear, no pain, no death threat had been enough to break you. Not even your memories.

His hand rests on the lower part of your cheek, his thumb smearing the blood on your lips. “You stubborn little thing.”  
You stare back at his greish irises, breaking the stare just when you feel fingers digging in your wound. You immediately scream in pain and shut your eyes close, feeling his fingers reaching deeper inside of you.  
Suddenly, a vivid flash of your body rotting appears in your mind: you can see through holes in your decaying arms the bones and tendons, each slightly moving as your wrists turn.  
Your eyes immediately fall on the now gaping hole inside your stomach: the smell is horrible, and you can see what you presume are your own organs sprawled on the floor, small worms and maggots eating and moving inside your wound.

You close your eyes shut and press the back of your head against the wall. “Fuck this- fuck this- fuck this-“  
Your only thought becomes fleeing from all of this, and with a high-pitched whistle his fingers retract, the hallucination disappearing before your eyes.  
“You don’t fucking own my mind.” You breathlessly murmur as your head slightly leans forward, blood loss darkening the edges of your vision.  
He isn’t listening to you, too busy staring at a point in front of him, lost in thought.

“Go on. Do your creepy shit again. Fill this place with monsters wearing human skins. Tell me I’m a wreck for having my fucking family shot. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, and nothing I can’t handle.”  
“That’s the point,” He says as his eyes set back on you “you don’t fear death. You seek it. Going against any base instinct a human being normally has…”  
His palm rests on your abdomen, the wound slowly disappearing underneath his cold skin. “What do I have to do with you? There surely is a way to…”

He pauses for a split second, his mad eyes gleaming again.  
“…switching section of the brain is the key.”

Your vision is still too blurry to focus on his curious expression. You can only feel his rough fingers grabbing your jaw and keeping it in place; he leans in, pressing his lips against yours. You gasp and push back, the flavor of ash and blood and medicine still on your mouth.  
He closes the gap once more, pressing your mouths together. You try to fight him, but your hands are slammed by an invisible force on top of your head, hitting against the wall and being held in place. Your jaw slackens more each time the thought of biting him crosses your mind.  
You feel his hands resting on the portion of skin just below your breasts, moving then down on your sides.

“Yes. This will do.” The invisible force stops restraining you: your hands lower to your sides as you still press yourself against the wall, more to get away from him than anything else.  
“Stay still.” Your body completely freezes, and no matter how hard you try to move, you are stuck in place.  
He takes a step back and looks at you up and down, immobile against the wall. A small smile curves his charred lips.

“I completely discarded the desire region of your brain. Thought you were too special for these lowly experiments. I should’ve known better.” He says, stepping away from you, almost lost in thought again.  
You look at the corridor still on your right: dark, endless, probably too dangerous to even walk inside, but it still was your best bet.  
You wait for him to turn his head away from you and silently run towards the dark corridor.

“Did I tell you to move?”  
Every muscle in your body completely freezes again: you almost topple on the ground as you feel that silent command being issued to your whole being. You only manage to motionlessly stare into the void in front of you as you hear him pacing next to you.

You see him in the corner of your eye, smiling satisfied. His hand trails up your throat and locks on your jaw, turning your head towards him.  
You stare at him before being drawn to him and pressing a kiss on the corner of his mouth, gazing down at his lips. His arm winds around your waist, lightly squeezing your bottom, huskily murmuring in your ear “Good girl.”

You hear the by-now familiar creaking noise before your body disappears from the dirty industrial room you had been trapped in; you feel void surrounding you for a moment before you land on top of soft fair bed sheets.  
You feel something else weighing next to you: you follow the hand pinned at your side to his owner, staring at a half naked Ruvik leaning on top of you.  
The scars are mostly gone, fair blonde hair shields his sharp green eyes, a ghost-like charm surrounding his pale figure. He is wearing an unbuttoned white shirt and dark pants.  
He licks his lips as he places himself between your legs. He doesn’t say a word as he lowers his lids, skimming down your body, his blonde lashes caressing his cheeks.

You close your eyes for a moment, and feel your conscience emerging just the little to formulate one single thought.

“ _This goddamn fucker-_ ”

You crack your eyelids open again: his lips are curved in a sassy smile. He probably still hears you, after all.  
You almost flinch when you feel soft fingertips touching your chest instead of his usual rough skin.  
He lowers on top of you and places a kiss on that delicious spot between your neck and shoulder, trailing up towards your throat as you throw your head back and letting out a guttural moan.

He slowly unbuttons your vest, exposing your chest and stomach. As his mouth trails down your chest, leaving open-mouthed kisses on your bare skin, his hands linger for a moment on the skin of your stomach before moving to undo your pants.  
He yanks them down your hips, quickly taking them off of you. You watch him lower down on your body, feeling his tongue pressing against the thin cloth of your underwear, and you can’t help but moan at the heat sensation crawling up your spine.

His eyes meet yours as he moves your panties to the side and presses a kiss on the outer lips, slowly lapping at them and spreading them to have better access.  
Your spine instinctively arches as he takes his time to explore your sex, licking and sucking and gently nibbling from time to time, his deep green eyes seldom leaving your gaze.  
You feel his mouth moving down, probing your entrance with his tongue, pleased at its wetness.

He kisses your inner thigh as he raises up, looking at you. He pushes a finger past your folds, feeling your whole body stiffen immediately around him. “Shhh.” You take in deep breaths as he slowly pulls his finger out and pushes it back in. “Relax.”  
He soon adds another finger inside of you, delicately pumping them in and out, visibly enjoying you moaning and whimpering at his ministrations.  
His fingers spread you further apart and you can’t help but let out a deep moan as he scissors index and middle finger inside of you.  
You wantonly look at him, noting his stiff cock shaping a tent in his pants. “Ruben…”

He takes his fingers out of you and before he can move you’ve already sat up and placed a kiss on his mouth, your hands quickly working his pants open.  
You fish his length and pull it out of his pants, stroking it a couple of times and feeling his ragged breath against your skin.  
His eyes meet yours for a moment before he kisses you again, pushing you underneath him and taking off his shirt before leaning once more on top of you.  
You feel his arms wrapping around your form and his length pressing against your entrance, its head making way between your folds and pushing inside. He slowly thrusts inside of you, inch by inch until he’s fully sheathed inside. He presses a kiss on the corner of your mouth and you kiss back, your thighs gently wrapping around him.

He thrusts inside a couple of times before stopping, repeating the process just to see how angry he could get you.  
“Ruben--” He just smiles at your angry expression. “You jerk…” a playful smile curves the corners of your mouth as you comb his blonde hair back with your fingers, meeting the gaze of his green eyes. His hand slowly moves near the side of your face, fondling your hair and playing with a single strand of your (h/c) hair.  
“I prefer you without this.” The lock he is holding between his fingers turns back to its original dirty white color, just as the rest of your head. Two fair pinkish irises were now staring back at Ruvik.  
A small smile crosses his features.  
“This looks much better.”  
It had been a long while since you had looked really like you. At first, it had never bothered you. Then, as you grew up, you realized the albino look reminded you too much about Leslie, too much about the past you had been trying to forget.

You place your hand on his shoulder, focusing. In a matter of seconds, his form shimmers and shifts, revealing the ghost he had decided to appear as.  
He takes a moment to realize what you had managed to do: his eyes widen as he stares at his now scarred arms. “How?!” He’s very close to being speechless, his wide eyes staring at you in disbelief. “How did you-“  
You wrap your arms around his shoulders and press another kiss on his mouth, rolling your hips against his.  
You roll him underneath you, careful not to touch his scars.  
“I’ll be gentle. I swear.” You murmur with a smile, not even remembering how you actually got here in the first place.

You delicately pick up a pace, feeling his hands still grabbing and caressing your thighs, his hips buckling against yours from time to time.  
It takes you very little to feel that familiar tension building up in your stomach;  
You scream his name as you come undone, your walls rhythmically clenching around his length, helping him ride his own orgasm.  
You slowly lower on top of him, resting your head on his shoulder and the rest of your body on top of his.  
You feel him placing his hand on the back of your head, wrapping his other arm around your back and keeping you close. He lightly shakes his head, sighing and smiling again “You…” he caresses the side of your head, and you lightly raise it to stare back at him. “How the hell did someone like you end up in this place with me?”  
You gently kiss his cheek and smile. “A bad twist of luck and a great leap of faith.”

He kisses you again, like he always did, like he had always done.  
It was like reliving a memory, thinking back at all the time spent with someone: seconds long flashes of entire years spent together, all the crying and the fighting and the happiness of entire afternoons spent in the bed with the one you love.  
If Jimenez had been telling the truth… if Ruvik was actually connected to other people’s minds – but of course he must be, since you had suffered from it firsthand when he dug into your memories – then… he must have seen other people’s memories. Their lives. Their loved ones.

He must have been feeling like he missed pieces. Why choosing you to mend it, that was entirely another matter.

You completely black out at some point, even as the memories are playing in front of your eyes. You open your eyelids and snap your head to quickly look at your surroundings: you are in the same corridor where the box headed man had hit you.

You can’t see neither Keeper nor Ruvik around you.

There were no more scratches or bruises on your body, but a particular soreness remained, nestled between your thighs.  
“That fucking asshat.”  
Your legs wobble a bit as you take some uncertain steps towards what looked like a door at the end of the hallway next to you.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Read too many posts about Ruvik being gentle with the people he cares about in bed to not write it. Sorry I took so long, but I really didn’t know how I wanted to write this chapter (seriously, there was also keeper involved in one of the versions, but lately I’ve written enough rape-y things and I wanted to keep this T-rated friendly, at least for the time being)


End file.
